Saturday, December 31, 2011

Violence itself is neither good nor bad. The persistent and widespread crimes of war, population-displacement, genocide, slavery and economic exploitation thrive on a vile violence of the powerful who occupy, oppress and suppress those made-vulnerable. But the needed violence of the victims for self-defence is noble. One violence is vile, the other is noble.

To prescribe sweeping pacifism is both to enable the crimes of violence of the powerful and to deny the rights of their victims, indeed to deny the humanity of the victims. [1][2][3] Pacifism proscriptions aimed at obedient workers and consumers (not police and soldiers) are continuously echoed by the pronouncements of power’s service intellectuals and image managers.

How does the nonsense of doctrinal non-violence masquerading as a theory of “social change” arise and why does it persist, in the face of all evidence? [1][3]

Dichotomous categorization is a strong intrinsic tendency of the human brain, anchored in the hard-wired binary fight or flight survival decision mechanism. As a result, in constructing the social self-talk of helpful recipes for our everyday lives we automatically and falsely “identify” binary good-bad pairs and categorize a given emotion or action or reaction as either good or bad in its own right rather than seek a deeper analysis of the broader circumstances determined by an array of factors. Since the individual’s role is delimited by hierarchy a deep individual analysis is a threat to the individual’s status within the hierarchy.

We thus arrive at nonsensical superficial conclusions such as that there are “negative” and “positive” emotions that in themselves need to be sought or avoided rather than objectively viewing emotions as metabolic messengers for acting in the world. This is a modern symptom of our detachment from community and from ourselves; a detachment driven by the dominance hierarchy that controls our lives.

In this way, violence and racism are superficially categorized as both negative and to be avoided in themselves and are outlawed in society -- rather than attempting to ascertain the circumstances of the particular violence or racism that may make the violence or racism both sane and beneficial. [3]

Racism itself is neither good nor bad. The racism of the oppressor facilitates violent oppression. But the racism of the oppressed is part of a communal mechanism of self-defence.

For example, it is natural and efficacious self-defence for an occupied or oppressed group to be racist against the occupier or oppressor. Minority Chinese immigrants are a priori justified in shielding their children from marriages with "white devils". A culture supporting global carnage and colonization is one to be avoided. It is judicious for a minority group in a Western country to viscerally associate white skin with danger that is to be avoided.

There is a strong and natural human affinity to racism, informed by millions of years of animal evolution. A vulnerable species needs to recognize predators and associate key predator characteristics with danger and repulsion. Sedentary or nomadic tribes need to recognize more aggressive predatory groups by whatever racial or other characteristics are available. And so on, as a matter of self-defence. And, when it comes to invaders who rape, pillage and kidnap, it serves to preserve a strong and durable cultural memory via racism embedded in individual psychology.

Liberal sweeping anti-racism proscriptions are an immature attempt to deny reality; anchored in the false belief that behavioural dictates determine societal truths. The accompanying liberal policies, laws, etc., are a how-to guide for sticking one’s head in the sand. Is there less sexual perversion among those who practice polite discourse? Is a Canadian mining corporation operating in Latin America or the Congo less racist because of its anti-racist employment practices at home office? Or more environmental because the home office recycles? (Those who answered yes to the last few questions can stop reading at this point.)

Democratic liberal society's recent blanket anti-racism proscriptions managed by the service elites represent systemic attempts to counter the natural affinity for racism, structurally intended as an operational device to facilitate intra-species inter-race cooperation in the modern urban corporate economy?

A sweeping anti-racism proscription facilitates economic exploitation in a unified workforce model and protects the bosses from being racially identified. Negating individual thought and opinion-racism serves to hide the economy's racism of dominance, and hierarchical dominance itself (we are all equal).

Anti-racism assimilation strengthens and feeds the dominant “culture” (elite groups) most tied to the invading hierarchy, a process known on the planetary scale as “globalization”. Superpowers use racism to divide and conquer competing systems and “combat racism” in assimilating conquered peoples. (Federal “bilingualism” is used in a similar way to assimilate French Quebec into English Canada.)

Here, a broad anti-racism facade also facilitates the recruitment of large arrays of needed service leaders and managers of the same race(s) as the race(s) to be handled. It’s easier for home office to cleanse a territory of brown people on another continent if home office First World middle-class managers and press officers are multi-coloured.

Sweeping anti-racism in the form of behavioural proscriptions within liberal so-called free and democratic (i.e., stable self-indoctrinated) societies actually helps to preserve the racism of the oppressors and inter-class racism. [3][4]

Racism cannot be eliminated, no more than “negative” emotions can be eliminated. Instead, racism must be identified and used within its true context of class struggle and anti-oppression self-defence. Down racism (directed down the hierarchy) must be continuously fought. Up racism (directed up the hierarchy) should be optimally applied while being vigilant to maintain its “up” orientation. Horizontal racism within a hierarchical stratum must be diffused and channelled into up racism or up classism.

In this way, by a continuous acknowledgement of racism and a continuous discernment of the type of racism active in the context of fighting one’s own oppression, racism becomes a natural tool that helps one better perceive and gauge one’s own oppression. The anti-oppression struggle, distinct from but intertwined with the struggle of community building, becomes primary and race becomes secondary. Inter-class racism is gone when one can use racial language in critiquing an inter-class member in the same way one would refer to any other personal characteristic, without prejudice.

Inter-class racism used to leverage inter-class advantage or hierarchical “advancement” is a crass form of opportunism. It is a modern derivative racism, a device sustained by “free and democratic” hierarchical systems, not primitively related to survival and oppression racisms.

The Right feels disdain for any sign of formalized leverage racism at a guteral level as it clings to its myth of a level playing field (fair competition) supervised by responsible parents (institutional or natural – rules or invisible hand).

The Left wants to be managed (oppressed) fairly as it clings to its own myth of just and beneficial social engineering (elite manipulation).

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science (including physics and environmental science) which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and several social commentary essays. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. His dismissal case is in court hearings that will extend into 2012.

Tuesday, December 20, 2011

We like to nurture a species self-image where we are radically different from ants and bees. The idea goes like this. Ants and bees are automatons completely governed by chemical and physical signals and each individual in the colony has its place which determines its physical body characteristics, adapted to the function of its class.

We distinguish these colony insects from mammals which we project have much higher degrees of individuality. We like to think of herds or packs of mammals as individuals who “choose” to come together and cooperate. We generally don’t admit body characteristics of individuals as being associated with class in societal dominance hierarchies.

But humans, primates and ants and bees may be much closer than we care to admit, then we are easily able to perceive.

There is an area of scientific research which points to just how wrong we may be. It is the study of the effects of a dominance hierarchy on the health of the individual. It turns out that in mammals and birds, for example, the health of the individual, barring accidents of nature, is primarily due to the individual’s position in the society’s dominance hierarchy [1][2][3]. Here, one needs to stress “primarily”, as in by far the greatest determining factor -- having a direct bio-chemical and physiological impact [1].

The dominance hierarchy in packs of monkeys, for example, determines fertility, resistance to disease, vigour, and longevity of the individual [1].

Now the dominance hierarchy as individual health determinant discovery is a paradigm-establishing discovery in medicine (if medicine is ever able to recognize it! [3]), akin to plate tectonics in the Earth sciences, Newtonian mechanics in physics and evolution in biology, but it naturally leads to a follow-up question: Why?

Is there an evolutionary advantage, for mammals say, to suffer severe individual health effects from the intra-species dominance hierarchy? Otherwise, how has individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy survived on the evolutionary time scale? Is there a use or a need for individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy in terms of species survival, or is it simply a remnant of pre-insect-divide or colony-forming cells evolution?

A first glance would suggest that the human species, for example, cannot possibly benefit from having individual health materially and negatively affected by society’s dominance hierarchy. But is this the correct conclusion?

I think not.

What is the most successful nervous-system-bearing animal species on Earth, in terms of both number of individuals and total biomass, and in terms of its transformative impact on the biosphere? Answer: Ants [4]. And the most successful large mammal? Humans [5]. Both live in highly hierarchical societies.

What is the sustaining biology of a highly hierarchical society of mammals? The individual must accept his/her place. All-out competitiveness of equal individuals (like a bar fight) is a recipe for disaster and does not lead to a highly stratified hierarchy. Pumped individuals who are and feel equally strong do not spontaneously organize into a stratified dominance hierarchy.

The built-in individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy is the biological (bio-chemical-metabolic) mechanism that sustains a positive feedback able to spontaneously generate a highly stratified dominance hierarchy.

If you are and feel sick from being dominated, you are not going to fight back. You are going to accept your place. The species is happy to have hoards of unhealthy individuals who will die young having spent their days doing the grunt work. What better way to stratify a successful species?

The impact on individual health also plays another key role, in addition to providing the feedback for stratification. It provides a needed mechanism of self-destruction for individuals who grow out or fall out of docility and compliance.

In a highly stratified society, individuals who cannot function must be eliminated, or they become a destructive force against the hierarchy. The police and jails would never be enough to achieve this without the built-in individual health vulnerability to dominance hierarchy.

As soon as the individual wants out and senses that there is no out, the individual self-destructs -- rather than go on a destructive rampage, most of the time. This is called cancer and heart disease. It prevents the destructive rampage of the disillusioned individual and provides a natural end at the completion of the individual’s cycle of utility to the hierarchy, to the species.

No wonder anarchists are so few and far between! But as with any positive feedback-driven system, it is inherently unstable [6].

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science (including physics and environmental science) which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and several social commentary essays. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. His dismissal case is in court hearings that will extend into 2012.

Thursday, November 24, 2011

It seems to me that anytime anyone recommends an invasion of my body as beneficial, whether it be a drug, radiation, a food or surgery, I would want to know why this person believes it will be beneficial and I would want that any reason given makes sense to me.

Why should I believe someone wearing a white lab coat and who knows big words? Because he/she has nurses and administrative assistants attending to him/her? Because there is a certificate on the wall? Because he/she has a legal right to administer "treatments"?

Should I not instead refer to history? Medical history is a continuum of harmful treatments, from bleedings to unnecessary surgery to psycho-active drugs. There has not been a sudden or even gradual break in medical history where treatments have become based on sound scientific research. Only the usual facade of legitimacy and scientificacy.

Medicine's main stratagem is appeal to authority. You want a benevolent parent, someone who knows and is fair, well here you are.

And it's not like the clinicians themselves understand the medical research or statistical analysis of research results or are in any way equipped to critique the constant flow of peer-reviewed career-motivated medical journal drivel... They are not.

Nor do these lobotomized assembly-line clinicians trust their own observations or perform their own evaluations of treatment merit. They only order tests and apply the recipe of "recommended treatment" prescribed by the test results, based on published medical journal pronouncements. They do not probe their patients beyond the canned questions on their checklists of assignable (and billable) "treatments".

It is sad to have reduced medical doctors to this role of drug pushers and selectors for the surgeon's knife, the chemist's poison and the radiologist's dose. Where are the thinking-feeling independent agents of good that we might reasonably hope for?

How did medical school become entry-level gang-membership indoctrination instead of a place of learning about the human body and its metabolism?

Why can't there be any discernment between the obvious and any excuse for some recommendation or drug prescription?

Medicine seriously needs to be democratized. We all need to get to know our own bodies and the human body's remarkable ability to heal itself, given the needed conditions.

I think the first step to knowledge is to rebel against those that feign and hoard knowledge. This rebellion can take many forms: boycott, challenge, punishment...

Take charge. Seek a solution to your oppression. Alleviate or repel your oppression and your health will recover. If it does not then, in any case, you most-probably have an ailment that medical science can do nothing about. Accept this fact and do the right thing.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011

At Occupy Ottawa only those most intent on defending the occupied space and willing to risk police arrest and police violence remained and setup their tents in the large empty fountain in the park. Last night they were "evicted".

I received this report:

There were about 150 [police] officers, unmarked and marked cars all around the periphery of the park and a make-shift Intake Centre at the armoury. None of us not already in the park were allowed in. It was too snowy to take good video. We could say from a police perspective that it was a "success"...

From our perspective too: best case scenario. No pepper spray, 8 arrests but no charges, only trespass tickets.

Monday, November 21, 2011

Abstract -- Establishment medicine is sustained by a triad of core deceptions: (1) An apical lie by omission which does not admit that the predominant causal determinant of an individual’s health is the individual’s real and perceived place in the society’s dominance hierarchy, (2) the “voodoo lie” of the false scientific foundation of its professional practice which does not admit that most of medical research used to justify the recommended “treatments” is wrong and that consequently the “treatments” are ineffective at best, and (3) the dirty secret that establishment medicine (in North America) is itself the third leading cause of death, after cancer and cardiovascular failures for which medicine is of little use. All three core deceptions have been decisively exposed by leading-edge mainstream researchers whose works have had virtually no impact in reforming the profession.

In his “An Appeal to the Young” Peter Kropotkin, in 1880, challenged young graduates entering the professions this way [1]:

"What the devil!" you say. "But if abstract science is a luxury and practice of medicine mere chicane; if law spells injustice, and mechanical invention is but the means of robbery; if the school, at variance with the wisdom of the ‘practical man,’ is sure to be overcome; and art without the revolutionary idea can only degenerate, what remains for me to do?"

Well, I will tell you.

A vast and most enthralling task; a work in which your actions will be in complete harmony with your conscience, an undertaking capable of rousing the noblest and most vigorous natures.

Professional schools of course do not follow Kropotkin’s curriculum. Instead, professional training directs the student’s self-indoctrination to accept the scam of the profession [2].

Hierarchy -- Hidden Predominant Health Factor

To potential medical doctors Kropotkin prescribes this [1]:

You, doctors ... never weary of telling us today, tomorrow, onward to decay if men remain in the present conditions of existence and work; that all your medicaments must be powerless against disease while the majority of mankind vegetate in conditions absolutely contrary to those which science tells us are healthful; convince the people that it is the causes of disease which must be uprooted, and show us all what is necessary to remove them.

Come with your scalpel and dissect for us, with an unerring hand, this society of ours, hastening to putrefaction. Tell us what a rational existence should and might be. Insist, as true surgeons, that a gangrenous limb must be amputated when it may poison the whole body.

Non-“abstract” science has, since Kropotkin’s time, further informed us about the “conditions absolutely contrary to those which science tells us are healthful” as follows: Of course a lethal workplace (such as unregulated mining in a toxic dust environment) kills, as do starvation, malnutrition, hypothermia and dehydration, as extreme physiological stresses that cause metabolic failures or invite disease. But barring obvious utmost physical causes of health failure associated with war and extreme exploitation of populations, science has shown that the next predominant determinant (not just correlate but causal determinant) of individual health is the individual’s real and self-perceived position in the society’s dominance hierarchy [3][4].

Documented empirical facts and experimental results from the small but vibrant “hierarchy and health” mainstream medical research community (e.g., [3]) establish a dominant causal relationship between socioeconomic status and human health and mortality; which is not simply due to differences in resource allocation, access to medical care, life-style differences (smoking, drinking, diet, exercise, etc.), work accidents and other such relatively “incidental” whole-population factors but which instead is due to the direct impacts of dominance hierarchy on physiological functions.

Socioeconomic status is the single most dominant predictor of health, and the physiological mechanisms for this causal relation (from socioeconomic status to individual health) continue to be elucidated by population studies and laboratory experiments [3].

The vector is psychosocial stress which significantly impacts the immune system, fertility, the brain, the heart (hypertension, pathogenic cholesterol profile), and adrenal gland function [3]. This in turn acts via the canonical link between the immune system and cancer (second leading cause of death) and via the first leading cause of death which is cardiovascular failure, in stable societies [4].

The known main stress-causing social circumstances arising from dominance hierarchies are [3]: “(i) low degrees of social control and predictability ...; (ii) a paucity of outlets after exposure to stressors ...; (iii) a paucity of social support ...; or (iv) high rates of physical stressors ...”

It follows, therefore, that one of the medical establishment’s first priorities will be to keep this pivotal and conclusive scientific finding -- that the society’s dominance hierarchy is the dominant causal determinant of individual health -- hidden from collective consciousness. Otherwise, Kropotkin’s medical school curriculum might threaten to impose itself and the medical profession would be robbed of its placebo and poison-as-medication scams which are the economic drivers of its societal status, within the dominance hierarchy which causes ill-health in all but the uppermost strata in its structure...

That subservience kills -- is THE killer, is a truth that must not surface.

As with any profession, the medical profession’s predation of the broader society is premised on a lie so big that the truth cannot easily emerge. Imagine that...: All the “health factors” that medicine preoccupies itself with are completely secondary, when they are relevant at all, compared to the overbearing impact of an individual’s oppression from the society’s dominance hierarchy.

In addition to the dominance hierarchy stress on the subordinate individual being directly the main killer, it also makes one stupid [3]:

“Animals who are socially stressed by the dominance hierarchy for prolonged periods undergo neurobiological changes as well. This can involve inhibition of neurogenesis, dendritic atrophy, and impairment of synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus and altered patterns of apoptotic cell death (increases in the cortex and decreases in the hippocampus)”

which may be part of the reason, in a stable dominance hierarchy, that corrupt and predatory professions and organizations are so resilient against exposure and reform -- but I digress.

That subservience is the killer is the apical lie of the medical establishment. It is a lie by omission. Next there is the lie of a false practice, what might be called the “voodoo lie”: That the mainstream practice of medicine is not based on science as alleged by adherents. And, finally, there is the dirty secret: That medicine is the third leading cause of death in “advanced” societies (North America), surpassed only by conditions (cancer and heart disease) for which medicine can do virtually nothing. Let us examine these further lies as follows.

Medical Research -- Bad Science

A small group of establishment so-called "meta-researchers" have pointed out what must at some level be obvious to many clinicians and researchers, that most medical research findings are wrong. "80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong", as do large fractions of both randomized and large randomized trials [5]. Meta-researchers find that most medical research on which medical practice is based is "misleading, exaggerated, and flat out wrong" [5].

These meta-researchers are highly recognized and publish in the top medical journals yet their message does not drive reforms in the profession. This paradox has been tentatively explained this way [6]:

“[T]he medical establishment, with its heavy mythology about saving lives, is in deep need of reparative peer-group banter. And what better banter then that from a meta-researcher explaining that from a statistical perspective -- without actually ever singling anyone out -- that from a statistical perspective most of what we take as known and most of what we do is wrong, haha, see the graph over here...

[The medical meta-researcher] is a provider of self-image-soothing locker-room banter for the medical profession. Only colleagues who will dare to point fingers have any chance of changing anything.”

In any case, the main point here is that most medical research is not reliable. This is not surprising for many reasons, both societal and scientific, not the least of which is that the research concerns itself with distant secondary or false causes of ill-health since it is blind by-design to the predominant direct causal factor that is the society’s dominance hierarchy.

The research studies by-design exclude the most relevant interpretive paradigm (effects of hierarchical oppression) and instead concentrate on ancillary factors which in turn are statistically disordered by the particulars of the hierarchical oppression and of the individual’s response to this oppression. The career-driven researcher attempts to extract (consequently dubious and always tenuous) statistical correlations between supposed causal indicators and supposed health indicators, both being neither, in view of recommending a treatment, which often happens to be an expensive pharmaceutical “medication” aimed at providing only a marginal improvement in patient comfort without an objective measure of patient comfort. The latter is called “palliative care.”

So drugs are approved as demonstrated-safe and then withdrawn because they are killers and organs are removed as standard treatment until the practice "evolves" and regular cancer tests are highly recommended until they are "discovered" to do more harm than good and AIDS is created into a human epidemic thanks to vaccination programs and fat is unhealthy until it is declared healthy and poison is good for you because when we stop the poison you think you feel better then before we started and indicator symptoms (like high blood pressure) can be removed with powerful drugs so you can die of the actual cause with the benefits of drug side effects and without ever knowing why and on and on.

The practice of medicine, when it is based on scientific research, is based on bad research providing wrong results. Modern medicine is good at trauma intervention (heart attack, road accident, sporting accident, etc.). Beyond that: Beware. Beware indeed, as the next section shows.

Medical Practice -- Death Machine

We’ve all heard some medical doctor interviewed on the radio gratuitously make the bold proposal that life expectancy has increased thanks to modern medicine. Nothing could be more distant from the truth.

Life expectancy has increased in First World countries thanks to a historical absence of civil and territorial wars, more accessible food, less work and non-work accidents, and better overall living and working conditions. Not surprisingly given the above discussion, the single known strongest documented indicator of personal health within and between countries is economy status, irrespective of access to medical technology and pharmaceuticals.

As noted above, the only statistically significant advances in establishment medicine (distinct from public health) are in trauma intervention. That is, less young folks in urban centers die of heart attacks and more car accident victims survive.

Outside of trauma intervention, the impact of establishment medicine is far from neutral. It is conclusively negative. The third leading cause of death in North America is medical error, after cardiac disease and cancer -- not counting misattributed deaths from correctly administered “treatments” and there is a large gap between this conservative underestimate in the number of medical error deaths and the fourth leading cause of death [7][8].

Since medicine can do little for heart disease and cancer and since medicine has only a small overall statistical positive impact in the area of trauma interventions, it is fair to conclude that public health would increase if all medical doctors simply disappeared [9]. And think of all the time loss and stress that sick folks would save…

One of the most dangerous places in society is the hospital. Medical errors include misdiagnoses, bad prescriptions, prescriptions of medications that should not be combined, unnecessary surgery, unnecessary or badly administered treatments including chemotherapy, radiation treatment, and corrective surgeries.

In a remarkable disregard for logic and for discriminating cause and ancillary effect, doctors in their recommended practice prescribe drugs to remove symptoms that are risk indicators (i.e., correlates) rather than address the causes of the risks, thereby only adding to the assault on the body.

Bone head medical doctors and psychiatrists routinely apply unproven (see above) “recommended treatments” and prescribe dangerous drugs for everything from high blood pressure from a sedentary lifestyle in oppression, to apathy at school, to anxiety in public places, to post-adolescence erectile function, to non-conventional sleep patterns, and to all the side effects from the latter drugs.

Psychiatry’s large-scale vicious attack against people is documented in the works of Peter Breggin [10] who explains how this profession has in the recent past gone along with institutionalized mass murder [11].

Conclusion

We must conclude that establishment medicine, anchored in the medical profession, is an injurious scam and an occupying predator of people constrained within society’s dominance hierarchy. Of course doctors are respectable members of society, good parents, responsible professionals and all that but they are also the professional maintainers and executors, conscious or not, interested or not, of a system of exploitation and deceit that drains resources and vitality from an occupied population [4].

In light of the above, it is difficult to accept that “progressive” elements of society such as national workers unions in Canada, would campaign in favour of a universal drug program, for example, rather than directly campaign for health sanity and stringent constraints against big-pharma and medical insurance corporations and their political influence. A Left that stabilizes the dominance hierarchy rather than attempts to flatten it (democratize it) is part of the problem. At least on the libertarian Right individuals seek a free hand in defending themselves. [12]

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science (including physics and environmental science) which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and several social commentary essays. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. His dismissal case is in court hearings that will extend into 2012.

Saturday, November 19, 2011

High technology is evidence of a high collective intelligence in technologically advanced societies. Instant communication, accessible mass communication, fast travel, efficient resource distribution, lethal war technology, advanced entertainment, information, medical and building technologies, and so on, are all conclusive evidence of high collective intelligence.

Technologically advanced societies nonetheless preserve animality in that habitat and resource competition and dominance hierarchies remain intact and are the main determinants of social order.

The high degree of advancement of the technology is such that no individual in the society can alone reproduce or repair, not to mention understand, most technological devices.

This has the psychological impact to infantilize the individual in that the individual must accept technology as a given, produced and supplied by some meta-parent. The individual does not participate in the creation of his/her environment but instead only is allowed to inhabit the given technological environment, via compliance with the established order or dominance hierarchy.

It further infantilizes the individual by communicating that since the surrounding technology cannot be understood or created by the individual, then the parent-like others who create this technology must possess high intelligence and qualitatively superior knowledge.

Technology intimidates us into concluding that all or at least top-level engineers, doctors and scientists must individually be highly knowledgeable and highly intelligent.

This is true to the point where even when we personally know top-ranking engineers, doctors and scientists and know them to be normally moronic in their interactions with us we nonetheless assume that they must be brilliant in their work.

In fact, it is a fallacy to conclude that high technology implies intelligent scientists and engineers. It is a fallacy to conclude that high collective intelligence must have originated in and be supported by at-least-a-critical-mass of individual brilliance.

The fallacy stems from not recognizing that, contrary to Western scientific progress mythology, technology is a living and evolving macro-structure that does not require exceptional individual intelligence. Instead, technology has developed by common trial, error and adaptation, for over one hundred thousand years. It is the product of an evolution; a unique evolution tied to all of its historical circumstances and geopolitical textures.

It is an evolution in the same sense as biological evolution as we understand it -- with accidents, mass extinctions, spontaneous mutations, competition for survival, rapid population growths in niche environments, and so on. Most biological mutations are dead ends -- most patents are useless certificates; species invasion can transform a regional ecology -- a new gizmo can make the practices of an entire production sector obsolete; unneeded features of animal physiology persist (appendix, goose bumps, etc.) -- unneeded technological practices and steps persist (most of medicine and nutrition [1], etc.); and so on.

Just as over four billion years of biological evolution has produced a biosphere so impressive that it infantilizes us to the point of believing in ghosts and concluding that their must be a god-creator or gods, the technophere is so impressive that it leads us to conclude that it must be the product of geniuses. Indeed, we venerate idolized scientists and inventors as gods in the human realm.

The truth is that technology is the product of centuries of tinkering, accidents, adjustments and applications -- with cross-culture fluxes and multiple drivers -- without any need for high-priests, only practitioners who conserve the recipes and perpetuate the methods.

This is also true of the highest technology (quantum dot electronics, etc.) where the narrative that this highest technology stems from theoretical scientific advances is a scam mostly only perpetrated by the theoretical scientists themselves [2].

The truth is nobody knows how that gadget works. But, collectively, we know how to make it and, collectively, we will "improve" it. Many experts can talk "brilliantly" about how that gadget works but these talkers will not play a significant role in "improving" the gadget or in producing the new revolutionary gadget. They mainly only produce and maintain the system's control mythology [2].

We need to stop believing that there are geniuses and an intelligent elite class among us and start thinking for ourselves. We have succeeded in a cultural understanding that politicians are dangerous and manipulated idiots. That was progress. We need to understand the same point about researchers, doctors and scientists; technology's talking heads.

Let's not trust experts to sell us anything, including lifestyle changes and light bulb changes, whatever.

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science (including physics and environmental science) which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and several social commentary essays. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. His dismissal case is in court hearings that will extend into 2012.

This talk was delivered two days after Denis Rancourt was wrongfully fired from his tenured Full Professorship in physics at the University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada, in what is regarded as a major academic freedom case.

A chronology of the conflict between Rancourt and the institution's management is HERE.

These videos present a full story, with description of the teaching method, in 24 minutes.

RELATED:See author and physicist Jeff Schmidt's talk in the same panel HERE.

All UofOWatch posts about the on-going wrongful dismissal hearings: HERE.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

A system, such as the medical establishment, based on lies and anchored in a profession is extraordinarily resilient -- in the case of medicine, even in the face of itself being the third leading cause of death [1].

How can this resilience be explained? What are the mechanisms that preserve professions from any independent thinking of their members?

With medicine, it is not just all the lies about effectiveness of treatments and of recommendations, but there is also the lie of what is not said: That by far the dominant determinant of an individual's health is the individual's position in the dominance hierarchy that he/she inhabits and that all other factors pale in comparison [2].

On the medical research side (something the US alone funds at the rate of $100 billion/year), a small group of dedicated so-called "meta-researchers" have pointed out what must be obvious to most clinicians and researchers with a brain, that most medical research findings are wrong. "80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong", as do large fractions of both randomized and large randomized trials [3].

This was immediately apparent to me, as a non-medical scientist, when chemotherapy was recommended for a family member and I consulted the medical research literature about the recommended "treatment" -- that is, the comparative studies about the alleged benefits of the "treatment". Waaa.

In the present essay, I examine how it can be that the highly critical message of a meta-researcher such as Dr. John Ioannidis [3] can be so well received by the medical establishment on the one hand and so completely ineffective in causing any change in the medical establishment on the other hand.

Dr. Ioannidis provides an element of the answer himself: When asked why his message of the failure of medical research is so embraced by the profession, as measured by incomparable invitations to medical conferences and citation records of his published articles, he said "I think that people didn’t feel I was only trying to provoke them, because I showed that it was a community problem, instead of pointing fingers at individual examples of bad research" [3].

This leads me to re-state, yet again, my favorite truism about false social change: If you don't disturb anyone, in self-image or in societal status, then you cannot possibly be reforming anything.

But the analysis can be taken a significant step further. Dr. Ioannidis' professional peers, clinicians and researchers, crave to hear him describe his research results which show that most medical research on which medical practice is based is "misleading, exaggerated, and flat out wrong." [3] He is a top-draw at medical conferences -- they can't get enough of him.

This appears on first inspection to be a contradiction. So what is going on?

I think it's a peer-group phenomenon. Individuals in a given peer-group are perfectly comfortable adopting any behaviours, attitudes and positions -- such as dishonesty, theft, covert machinations, etc., which are not accepted in the broader societal self-image mythology -- as long as this is overtly recognized and approved within the peer-group, including a spoken or tacit recognition that the behaviours in question serve the interests of the members of the peer-group.

This is obvious and much of professional training involves developing the ideology and language that best conceals this gross truth about all professions [4]. For example, pick up a law textbook about the theory of lawyering under common law (a so-called "trial advocacy" textbook, say) and discover how in law there are "many truths" and how counsel must carefully select the particular truth that offers the best representation for the client, and that counsel is ethically bound to not lie... Quite stunning and the same is true of all professions.

A recent example involves university professors and the handy mythology of "academic freedom" [5], and illustrates yet another convenient compromise between the professional body of academics and management: [6].

A peer-group must comfort itself continuously in perpetrating its privileged-position-preserving assault on the broader society: From locker-room banter that "men are bastards" (haha) to lawyers in elevators joking about their purpose of "seeking justice" (haha), and so on.

As long as none of it gets personal, that the code is not broken, and that the Lie of the peer-group is supported to every peer-group member's benefit.

Well, the medical establishment, with its heavy mythology about saving lives, is in deep need of reparative peer-group banter. And what better banter then that from a meta-researcher explaining that from a statistical perspective -- without actually ever singling anyone out -- that from a statistical perspective most of what we take as known and most of what we do is wrong, haha, see the graph over here...

...Well now you know that the profession knows and that we meta-researchers are continuing to study this mother of all absurdities at the heart of our profession, and of course I only review the papers of other meta-researchers so do carry on and pay your association dues to invite more speakers...

It's perfect. The main Lie about actual objective value of the everyday acts of medical doctors, never mind the documented large-scale harm [1] and the unstated Truth [2], becomes the topic of comforting banter... that well, yes, it's what we do but we all do it and its the norm to just continue doing our individual best this way... It's the "practice"... the "standard recommendation"...

So drugs are approved as demonstrated-safe and then withdrawn because they are killers and organs are removed as standard treatment until the practice "evolves" and regular cancer tests are highly recommended until they are "discovered" to do more harm than good and AIDS is created into a human epidemic thanks to vaccination programs and fat is unhealthy until it is declared healthy and poison is good for you because when we stop the poison you think you feel better then before we started and indicator symptoms (like high blood pressure) can be removed with powerful drugs so you can die of the actual cause with the benefits of drug side effects and without ever knowing why and on and on.

My theory, therefore, is that Dr. Ioannidis is a provider of self-image-soothing locker-room banter for the medical profession. Only colleagues who will dare to point fingers have any chance of changing anything.

I'll take my chances with nature, thank you very much.

Endnotes

[1] For North American deaths; see the "Medicine is Health Lie" in "Some big lies of science" by Denis G. Rancourt, 2010, and references therein.

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science (including physics and environmental science) which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and several social commentary essays. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. His dismissal case is in court hearings that will extend into 2012.

Saturday, November 12, 2011

Academic freedom is a protection for what a professor does, not a protection to keep secret what a professor does.

By Denis G. Rancourt

In what can only be characterized as wacko, an Information and Privacy Commissioner (IPC), Ontario, Canada, Adjudicator has ruled (November 7, 2011, Final Order PO-3009-F, PDF-file) that it is legitimate to use academic freedom as a pretext to restrict transparency and accountability of public universities.

Whereas academic freedom exists to legally provide professional independence to professors and to allow professors to freely express their ideas without fear of reprisals -- in order to best serve society, the Adjudicator, in the context of access to information (ATI) requests, interpreted academic freedom as a device to shield professors from public transparency and accountability.

The Adjudicator ruled that, in Ontario, a professor's research and teaching cannot be subject to public transparency and accountability and that even administrative records that the individual professor feels are excluded "taking academic freedom into account" are also not available.

In an era of frequently reported incidents of academic and research fraud, and in a time when education is a highly valued commodity, this total blind spot, carved out using a misguided concept of academic freedom, makes the fact that universities in Ontario are subject to ATI law somewhat of a joke. This is especially true given that professors wholly contribute to the institution's administration via collegial governance.

Not only was a professor's publicly-funded work ruled not subject to transparency but in those cases where the Adjudicator found that certain components of a professor's work may be subject to ATI law, the Adjudicator ruled that the individual professor can decide whether or not ATI law would apply -- thereby making meaningful appeals of access decisions virtually impossible.

How did the IPC Adjudicator come to interpret academic freedom in this way?

Well, this is something about which I have some insider knowledge, as I was the ATI requester and the university in question was my former employer, the University of Ottawa. The request was made in 2006 and it has taken five years to get this brilliant and studied result.

The university refused me access to professors' communications about me. (It allowed me some access to the administration's communications about me but wanted over $28 thousand to service this part of the request. The IPC did not see this as a particularly outrageous fee... but I digress.)

The Adjudicator sought and obtained submissions from the university, from the professors' union (APUO) and from me. Both the university and the union argued (at length and supported by three U of O labour arbitration awards on the matter) that academic freedom meant that access under ATI law needed to be restricted for professors.

I argued the opposite, as follows.

On March 26, 2007:

Professors, as employees of the university, must comply with the Act, regarding all documents that pertain to their numerous functions as professors. For example, professors act on many administrative committees and executive councils and therefore have all kinds of formal and informal work-related exchanges involving the functioning of the institution and the working conditions of their colleagues. Academic freedom protects a professor’s rights to free speech and to professional discretion in fulfilling her responsibilities but it is not meant as a barrier to transparency or as a professor’s right to secrecy in exercising her duties.

And on November 21, 2007:

Professors have nationally-recognized academic freedom and tenure so that they are protected in their roles as independent societal critics and as independent teachers and researchers, not so that they can escape public scrutiny in performing their official duties related to policy, governance and opinion and decision making. Indeed, the very purpose of academic freedom and tenure is that professors not be subjected to undue pressures and reprisals for voicing their opinions. To use academic freedom as a barrier to access is to turn this instrument on its head and apply it against the public good.

... The APUO representations appear to be intended to give undue immunity to professors as a professional group, rather than respecting the true societal purpose and intent of academic freedom...

My arguments were not mentioned or retained by the IPC Adjudicator in the Order. Instead, the Adjudicator chose to delimit a compromise between the similar positions of the university and the union.

The madness of it all is like this. Since the university employer does not have a right to micro-manage a professor's work, and does not have an a priori right to inspect a professor's work or documents or communications, and since the ATI Act foresees that records respondent to a request will be administered in view of possible disclosure by the "head" of the institution, therefore, it was argued, a professor's records are not subject to the Act.

Well, even under the strict logic of the Act, that makes no sense at all because, whenever there is a complaint or evidence of fraud, the employer (the "head") is entirely entitled to obtain and examine all a professor's records arguably relevant to the investigation. The university has control over all records generated in a professor's work for the purpose of employee accountability. And an ATI request is all about accountability.

How did the Adjudicator get it so wrong?

She refused to hear the requester and instead had ears only for two powerful parties both having illegitimate interests to block transparency: The university does not want the public and media to be empowered to investigate academic and research fraud cases and the union does not want its members scrutinized by either the employer or the public. The national association of professors' unions (CAUT) is similarly misguided (here, here).

Academic freedom is a protection for what a professor does, not a protection to keep secret what a professor does.

The problem now is that this bad ruling can only be changed by an expensive judicial review. The IPC knows that institutions and unions can afford judicial reviews but that individual requesters cannot. So the IPC can afford bad rulings that lean towards the institutions.

Thus, Ontario becomes a rare jurisdiction where professors' records are not under the purview of ATI law. Bravo Madame Commissioner. Bravo U of O and bravo APUO.

This was not rocket science. The word that comes to mind for me is "pathetic."

ADDENDUM (November 13, 2011):

Actually (and perversely), a professor's research and teaching are already subject to qualified exclusions in the Act [sections 65.8.1(a) and (b) and qualifications 65.9 and 65.10] but the intended practice is that the "head" (professional ATI officer) decides the exclusions that apply on the particular respondent records which must be found and produced to the "head".

The instant ruling (paragraphs-181-182-183) would have individual professors decide all the exclusions of the Act based on their individual (mis)understandings of academic freedom - without any mechanism to verify a professor's decisions since the excluded records are then by definition excluded from consideration under the Act and are not provided to the head for eventual appeals (which would defeat the intent of letting the professors decide exclusion).

This is contrary to past practice where all respondent records are examined in an IPC appeal, including records argued to be excluded from the Act. It distances or shields the "head" from the burden of proof prescribed by the Act:

53. Where a head refuses access to a record or a part of a record, the burden of proof that the record or the part falls within one of the specified exemptions in this Act lies upon the head.

(Already the section of the Act most disregarded by the IPC, in my view.)

The new method of preventing the head from seeing a professor's records is premised on bad faith use by the head (as the professor's employer) of these records - despite such improper use being disallowed in law.

So one law (the FIPPA = ATI law) is vitiated to prevent an abuse that is against the law. Whereas academic freedom is suppose to be an iron-clad protection against exactly the expected abuse.

In the same breath, therefore, the alleged-sacrosanct academic freedom is acknowledged to be ineffective (except in restricting transparency).

I say: Either apply academic freedom as though it were real or abolish it. It is meant to protect independence not create secrecy. Secrecy is needed where there is no independence. A free society is an open society. Let's get our concepts straight.

Denis G. Rancourt is a former tenured and full professor of physics at the University of Ottawa in Canada. He practiced several areas of science (including physics and environmental science) which were funded by a national agency and ran an internationally recognized laboratory. He has published over 100 articles in leading scientific journals and several social commentary essays. He developed popular activism courses and was an outspoken critic of the university administration and a defender of student and Palestinian rights. He was fired for his dissidence in 2009. His dismissal case is in court hearings that will extend into 2012.

Friday, November 11, 2011

In the steady state of a society, in the absence of large direct consequences of war at home, including civil war and class war, in the absence of believable threats of violence against the dominance hierarchy, there are viable institutions which all continuously and progressively act to strengthen the dominance hierarchy [a].

The institutions are meant to maintain order and to provide stability for and continuity of the dominance hierarchy; by eliminating, deflecting, and consuming all threats. This is done under the pretense of educating, protecting, and providing for the obedient subjects of the dominance hierarchy.

The professionals who run all institutions are embedded into the overarching societal dominance hierarchy and must serve this master in order to maintain their status and relative privileges. Despite the solemn institutional mission-statement verbiage, therefore, these professionals know -- for their own good -- who they really serve.

As a result, the institutions grow and develop policies, practices and structures that monotonously sharpen and perfect the hierarchical pyramid.

The illusory "foundational principles" of institutions are merely the comforting promises which deceive subjects into abandoning autonomy in favour of accepting paternalistic management, and hierarchical control.

In advancing hierarchy (corporate fascism) the institutions necessarily erode the appearance of their own needed illusory "foundational principles" and must hide this erosion with ever more complicated or obtuse verbiage and ever more detailed and convoluted policies and rules; in exercises of sophistry that equal the most awe-inspiring human achievements (e.g., read Supreme Court rulings and note what is not said).

The subjects must be "educated" to receive this sophistry as high expert knowledge, even as the "foundational principles" telescopically disappear in the face of reality.

In this way, the institutions (education, justice, health, finance, war, etc.) work together -- in a highly coordinated fashion -- to optimally support the dominance hierarchy. Jurisdictions are established, sequences of treatment enacted, etc.

The entire excise of law-making is an exercise in institution management and optimization to best serve and advantage the top strata of the dominance hierarchy.

And then, every once in a while, when circumstances in the bottom strata get too tense and the subjects start to see beyond the verbiage and expert management, things heat up and there may be adjustments, even re-normalizations, and we start somewhat refreshed, with clarified mission statements and so on.

And, following this jog or even back-step, "progress" can once again be pursued.

Such is the dance of institutional change as I see it.

The above theory of institutional change is predictive.

For example, since the institution's "foundational principles" pronouncements are a description of falsely promised repairs to damage necessarily caused by the dominance hierarchy and since the institution truly functions to support the dominance hierarchy, it follows that an institution will always work to distance itself from its own "foundational principles" and, where the stated "principles" give rise to strongly expressed expectations among the objectified subjects [1], to weaken ("re-define", "improve", "modernize", "clarify") its mission promises to the extent that it can.

The institution, therefore, works exactly to oppose its own "foundational principles" or purpose or mission statements because these statements are an expression of the targeted systemic consequences of hierarchy that the particular institution is meant to neutralize by subterfuge. The institution as substitute parent acknowledges the injustice, reassuringly states that the harm will be repaired via a fair (although complex) process, and sends the victim of hierarchy down a road with no issue; thereby cooling the mark out [2], causing the victim to invest in the false solution, and dissipating the complaint.

Another predicted consequence is that, for many individual professionals who work in institutions, there will be an unresolved dichotomy between elements of the individual's formal education regarding the benevolence of institutions and the dominant professional training culture of kissing ass to serve hierarchy and one's career "advancement." This, in turn, gives rise to the phenomenon of whistleblowers and their persecution and, depending on the degree of social integration of the professional culture, to the phenomenon of professional worker malaise [3]. Otherwise, cynicism and peer-group-identification are major outlets [3].

[This article was inspired by the incredible November 7, 2011, Final Order PO-3009-F of the Information and Privacy Commissioner, Ontario; that I plan to critique soon.][HERE is the critique.]

Tuesday, November 1, 2011

Today was DAY-3 of the binding labour arbitration hearing into the wrongful dismissal case of physics professor Denis Rancourt. Following a rough start (link to all posts about hearings), it was up to the University, in the person of union-busting lawyer Lynn Harnden, to make the opening statements.

The opening statement did not disappoint. It was over-the-top with partial and undated extracts from blog posts, media articles, emails from unidentified sources; including lyrics from Immortal Technique, a reference to the Ottawa bank firebombing, allegations of inciting violence (evidenced by not inciting violence), and more.

Harnden distributed paper copies of his 19-page statement to the media and public: HERE.

The public and the union were stunned, as was the grievor.

The union, in the person of labour lawyer Sean McGee, patiently responded orally in an almost two-hour presentation. Here are highlights:

"His ideas are so dangerous that he is not allowed on campus without a police escort."

"Can a professor challenge the established order and entrenched patterns of thought? Can a professor adopt a methodology in his teaching and defend and protect that methodology ... without fear of the capital punishment of termination?"

"The University is offended, inconvenienced, and students criticize ... his methods are unpopular and unconventional ... but what is this case about?"

"The University's portrait of a Mansonesque figure is such a distortion of the facts."

"Calling this 'academic fraud' is shocking hyperbole from an institution of higher learning. The University alleges 'frivolous', 'fraudulent', 'selfish' ... there is nothing to suggest selfish. In fact, quite the contrary ..."

"Case in point, the use of Immortal Technique to show how demonic professor Rancourt is and to allege his desperation in his desire to lure students ... is reminiscent of Catholic nuns in Ottawa urging young girls to stay away from Elvis Presley's concert and his lewd and gyrating hips... and this now in the 21st century."

"Professor Rancourt was made to be increasingly limited to a smaller and smaller sphere of activity: from no teaching in 1st year, to no teaching, to being locked out of his laboratory, to blocking his cinema series, to blocking access to his campus radio show, to no campus access without police escort, to termination."

"This is significant evidence that the University wanted to cut off his efforts to communicate his ideas."

"We are going to ask you to conclude that professor Rancourt does not incite people to violence -- does not, has not, and will not incite anyone to violence. For the University to cite the law about risks of violent acts -- raising that in this context - is - difficult - to - understand - ..."

"The University is funding the defamation lawsuit [St. Lewis v. Rancourt] it now uses as evidence for professor Rancourt's dismissal..."

"In the end, this is a bad faith attempt to get rid of him at all costs."

"Regardless of what you think of professor Rancourt, we will ask you to find that there were no grounds for dismissal."

Tomorrow is DAY-4. The University wants a discovery order to dig into the Immortal Technique connection... Meanwhile, it has supplied none of the emails of the upper administration's known "war room" meetings in firing Rancourt.

Following public submissions (LINK), the Arbitrator had released his decision to ban all video and audio recordings of the hearings, which are done without an official court transcript -- see ruling HERE. The University's on-record repeated attempts (E.G.) to block the grievor's UofOWatch blog during the hearings fell flat and was not mentioned or retained in the Arbitrator's decision.

Saturday, October 29, 2011

The First World education complex is responsible to create the professional managerial force that advances and maintains the global North-South exploitative flux of human and natural resources; and, therefore, is responsible for a deeply-racist planetary-scale genocidal pillaging using continuous war in conjunction with financial predation.

It also is responsible for the indoctrination to maintain a vicious class hierarchy at home without which manning Empire would be impossible.

Yes, but that is too easy. As long as we only write about it we contribute to it. As long as we advance that education is the answer to education, we strengthen it. We must instead recognize that the first-line of defence lies in our own bodies, as we -- students and teachers -- are the first-line victims of education.

The first-line of defence against global madness, the only line that we are part-of, is our own personal rebellion against our own oppression. And overwhelmingly the dominant first-tier oppression against privileged-sector First World individuals is education, from pre-school to professional school. [1]

This is evident to graduate school and professional school students because the myth until then is to prepare for "real learning" up ahead. But the "real learning" never materializes. Professional schools must brainwash students to believe they have learned something and to accept to function as con artists (doctors, lawyers, bankers, scientists, etc.) in society. [2][3]

It is so difficult for many to accept that this is all the learning to be had that they willingly participate in their own brainwashing to believe they have acquired competence and knowledge, as part of self-preservation. The brainwashing is the major tour de force in the finishing of graduates. Often it is only accomplished in the internship, residency, or post-doctoral phase.

Here, the first victim is the new graduate who realizes that he/she knows nothing after some 25 or more years of grueling institutionalization, a large financial debt, and despite all the high grades and diplomas.

I once challenged a graduating top-of-her-class MD about her ignorance and she willingly admitted that in fact she knew nothing, absolutely nothing. Two years of residency later it was impossible to have that conversation. She still knew nothing.

My own experience was similar as a physicist-in-training. I was torn between the self-knowledge of my ignorance, despite the small pieces I came to have an impression of grasping, and my stellar professional advancement in terms of published papers, scholarships, high grades, and conference invitations. Everything pushed me to act-as-if and to assume a professional stance.

Next, in the classroom, my ignorance needed to be the most remote in appearance of all, whereas it would have been the most formidable pedagogic tool. Only after more than a decade of teaching would I start to discover critical pedagogy, largely by accident and thanks to a stubborn desire to be true, and only as rebellion against the oppression of conventional teaching.

Then I would learn of the establishment's false critical pedagogy sector and the side industry that it is...

As Paulo Freire would say, you can only fight your own oppression and that is the most you can do. The real front of resistance is in the body of the first-tier victim. The intensity of the victim's rebellion is the magnitude of the resistance. The rest, outside of praxis, is academic blah blah which only strengthens the oppressor's grip.

If you are not suffering significant backlash then that is evidence that you are contributing to the oppression and if you have been integrated (buried) it's a sign you are dead. Enjoy your shallow "life" and may your children be just like you.

The First World education complex is responsible to create the professional managerial force that advances and maintains the global North-South exploitative flux of human and natural resources; and also partly or largely responsible for intra-Empire mythology, the obvious military-technology dominance, local-elite management, and supporting and developing empire-workforce and manager self-image survival strategies in the face of genocidal oppression and perpetual war.

The binary oppressor-oppressed pair is rooted in racism, a racism most apparent on the front and most denied at home.

In the heart of the Empire, a most powerful denial mechanism of the system's vicious racism of death is to vocally expend energy purporting to eliminate race bias in the selection of professional workers to integrate the exploitative hierarchy and to loudly celebrate this "success" in terms of obedient Black judges, professors, CEOs, presidents, etc.

For the denial strategy to work, it is essential that no criticism of the strategy itself be allowed and that any such criticism be itself virulently attacked as racist. In this way, the activism in the "anti-racism" of "equity" or "affirmative action" in professional circles becomes a dominant home-front battle in support of front-line racism both at home (prisons, reservations, poverty, etc.) and abroad (war, genocide, economic predation, etc.).

Virulent defenders of equity for elite workers scream "racism" so loudly -- while referring to the on-going Black North American holocaust -- that the term loses its meaning. And critics white or black who might suggest that to integrate is to participate are mobbed.

Malcolm X's thrust for rebellion, self-preservation, self-defence, and non-integration is lost. And his lessons about house and field negros are consumed and re-cast in the "light" of academia-born "critical race theory" (LINK).

All of a sudden "house negro", as a defamatory term and as a basis for defamation lawsuits, means "a person who is a race traitor" and "a person who is a pariah in the black community" [1][2][3][4]. I don't think the media-reported critics who applied the term to Condoleezza Rice and Barrack Obama in any way meant to suggest that these public figures were pariahs in "the" black community...?

And what is a "race traitor"? The term "house negro" is a racial class analysis term, as spelled out by Malcolm X who introduced its contemporary use. A "house negro" is a black person who derives class privilege from serving and maintaining a racist class structure. A "house negro" is not a pariah among "house negros" and is not part of the community of "field negros".

Without discernment of class the terms "community", "race", and "pariah" have no truthful meanings and are used only to mask inter-class oppression.

Without effective criticism which goes to the root of self-image, our discourse can only support the oppression rooted in racism. Academic blah blah can only be harmful and this may be an example of that, a reflex learned in my own indoctrination (called education)?

Thursday, October 20, 2011

Recently, there has been some discussion on the Canadian law web site SLAW about an Ontario Superior Court of Justice ruling that is argued to have set legal precedent regarding attendance of public observers and media at court-supervised out-of-court cross-examinations.

The ruling on a procedural motion is HERE (see paragraph-20). The SLAW article is HERE.

I disagree that an unambiguous precedent has been set and I disagree with the ruling on this point. I argue that both the judge (Master) and the legal commentator (SLAW article author) erred in law by following the plaintiff (moving party) in not sufficiently discerning a cross-examination for discovery on the one hand and a cross-examination on an affidavit on a motion on the other hand.

In arguing a motion in Ontario, the evidence put on the public record in the open court is filed as affidavits in the Motion Record. Once filed in this way, the evidence has the same status as sworn evidence presented in court and is subject to cross-examination (as I have learned from hard-earned experience).

In a trial, such public record court-submitted evidence would be cross-examined in court and the cross-examination would of course be public, as is the entire in-court process. In a motion, therefore, where affidavits are used only to streamline the hearing not to vitiate the open court principle, it follows that the cross-examination of the affidavit should be public.

Otherwise, one has abridged the open-court principle without any fundamental justification.

A cross-examination (or examination) for discovery is a different situation where new evidence is "discovered" that may never be put on the public record (may never be filed as evidence), that is privileged, and that is legitimately subject to privacy protection.

Discovery is to "discover" whereas cross-examination on filed public record evidence is to test the evidence, just as it would be in open court. The submitter of evidence must be prepared to be cross-examined in public, unless the court orders otherwise for special reasons.

One problem arises with the asymmetry that in affidavits on motions in Ontario hearsay "evidence" is permitted (see Rules of Civil Procedure, Ontario). In this way, a client can be shielded from cross-examination by a lawyer who submits affidavit statements with the client's evidence in hearsay.

In addition, regarding the protection of privacy which the invoked concepts of discovery privilege and assumed undertaking (to not disclose) are meant to achieve, this was a situation where the defendant being cross-examined wanted public observation in the examination of his own information. The defendant also, in this case, filed the entire cross-examination court reporter transcript into public record evidence. These circumstances were not considered by the Master.

Just as the public nature of an in-court cross-examination does not deter the investigator in the depth and method of his/her cross-examination, the public's eye cannot be argued to overly constrain the investigator in a cross-examination on affidavit evidence on a motion. Indeed, the absence of a judge (only a court reporter is present) in the latter is an additional impetus for the presence of the public eye. And, in fact, there is no evidence that the examiner was constrained by the public eye in his cross-examination.

In the specific case, the plaintiff's complaint that one of the observers blogged an objectionable critique of the cross-examination was used partly to justify the Master's Decision without a complete examination of the merits of the critique, and the blogger's critique was partly re-posted on SLAW (HERE).

[19] Mr Dearden also asks for clear direction as to who may attend at the cross examination. The need for that is demonstrated by the exhibit at p. 154 of the motion record. Certain individuals who are not parties to the action attended at the cross examination and refused to leave notwithstanding Mr. Dearden’s objections. One of these observers then posted comments on the internet describing the cross examination and attributing unethical behaviour to Mr. Dearden while also suggesting the plaintiff herself was somehow associated with evidence of wrongdoing at the university.

[20] Mr. Rancourt objects to such direction on the basis of the open court principle. In that he is misguided. Cross examination or discovery does not take place in open court (although it does take place under court supervision). It is only once a transcript or portions of a transcript are tendered in evidence that they become part of the court record. Motion records and exhibits at trial are part of the court record. Court hearings (such as this motion) are held in open court though that was not always the case. Prior to adoption of the “new rules” chambers motions were not considered to be in open court or on the record. In any event it is quite clear that there is no right for the public to attend an examination out of court at the office of the special examiner or court reporter. Even were that not the case however, the court could give direction about the conduct of such examinations.

[21] There will be a follow up cross examination if the plaintiff wishes it. No one but the parties and their lawyers and the reporter may be in attendance unless otherwise agreed.

The Master's need to make a ruling the same day (given a next day's hearing of the main motion) and the usual constraints of limited court resources were also mitigating factors.

I believe that the question of public attendance at cross-examinations on affidavits on motions in Ontario largely remains an open question, one that opposing counsel's should consider in view of preserving and extending the open court principle without which we may as well abandon all illusions of an equitable system of justice management.

Links to all pleadings and court records in the main action are posted HERE. U of O Watch commentary articles are HERE.